Thursday, December 10, 2009

This past weekend I was at the ABPMP International Board Meeting and I got to know a bunch of new people, that like me, are really passionate about BPM. You may not know this, but Brazil is the Chapter of ABPMP with the biggest growth. They were overwhelming represented at the board. It was a delight to hear that there's at least one country in the American continent that is a full blown expansion. Chile and Colombia were also represented, as well the BPM community in Europe by Professor Goetz. I think the photos will come out as people start arriving to their countries... but here it is.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

This past weekend I attended the last ABPMP board meeting and was happy to realize, while talking to the guests and my peers, that we all are seeking something after BPM.

Over the weekend I was able to talk to Leandro Jesus, a bright and up-coming Brazilian educator and entrepreneur, that came up with a sentence that I will use from now on - "BPM is everything and is nothing". This expresses the reason why BPM continues to fail mass adoption, and why disciplines that cater to "Project Managers" and "Business Analysts', continue to advance in popularity and adoption.

So, what is the solution. Do we need the anti-bpm? I replied to Sandy Kemsley in regards to this topic. She didn't like too much (I think) of the "anti" word, and I tried to explain that "anti", isn't in the concept of denying BPM, but to making it move forward.

Be that has it may, the fundamental impression is that more people are getting to the realization that a new BPM needs to emerge. One that is able to reflect the umbilical connection to System Theory.

Unfortunately my passion for System theory as made me read a ton of books, most of them, before I develop my other passion for knowledge management. The result is that most of my notes on the books, are written in the book itself, making the process of cataloging the knowledge that I got from books, a slow, yet fascinating process.

I started the easy way, by copying those books that I bought from Amazon. Thankfully Amazon has a list of all my purchases, apparently going back as 2000. NICE!!!!!

I have been writing for years about Business Process Management on the M2MSys blog and it is very rewarding that, for a moment in time, Google's search algorithm considers that one of my blog entries deserves to be #1.... NICE!!!! Since I know that this situation will soon change, as other business process management experts, write about BPM books, I decided to do a screen capture, for future bragging rights.

Among 1,530,000 index articles by Google, on the words "BPM BOOKS", the blog entry I wrote was #1.

Business Process Management is a discipline that is starting to grow very rapidly. It's no longer the domain of a few early adopters. It's slowly maturing into the next hot thing... even thought it has been like that for a while.

A quick search on the word "BPM" on Google, gives you immediately a perspective of how competitive the BPM market is.

Unfortunately "BPM" is a word with many meanings. Google hasn't yet refined its search engine to determine that I'm not looking for the acronym "Beats Per Minute", or even looking for a band called "BPM". What is most amazing is that BPM is also a dutch acronym for a disease.

The RollsRoyce of BPM searches is actually the words "business process management". See the difference for yourself.

From 22.6 million index pages on BPM, this last search on "Business Process Management" actually returns 135 million. Pretty amazing!

Conclusion

"BPM books" is not the most competitive set of tags in the BPM universe. Nonetheless... even the Wall of China was built on brick at a time :-)

For the record, M2MSys is my first company and 3WCloud is a new one that I started with Neal Walters, my entrepreneur partner of many projects. You will see me talk about these two companies frequently. The reason is that both of them are about the same topic - enabling knowledge workers and organizations, to embrace complexity.

M2Msys focus on three areas of expertise about which I'm really passionte about: Business Process Management (BPM), sensor networks and complex adaptive system. This mix of subjects seeks to transform existing organizations, built on principles developed in the post war 20th century, into Hyper-Efficient and Hyper-Adaptable organization (H2O Organization). H2O organizations can self adapt to any type of changes.

3WCloud focus on the knowledge worker and Learning organizations, and seeks to develop new organizations based on knowledge workers, transforming them int Hyper-Efficient and Hyper-Adaptable organization (H2O Organization).

I have other big passions: healthcare and government. Mostly because they are critical to all our existence and they the furthest from being H2O organizations. In the healthcare I have been developing the concept of the Wellness Society Vision (www.wellnesssocietyvision.com) based on my experience dealing with the healthcare payers, both on the government and private sector.

I'm sure you notice that all of my passions even one thing in common... system theory... hence, here's the reason behind my blog title.